Since bursting into the literary scene in 1985, author Bret Easton Ellis has remained a divisive and controversial figure in popular culture. His debut novel Less Than Zero (1985) was described by revered critic Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times as “one of the most disturbing novels I have read in long time” and, most famously, his magnum opus American Psycho caused such intense public outcry that it was temporarily withdrawn from publication and later banned in some countries. The reason for all the dispute and infamy surrounding Easton Ellis – which has only solidified his subsequent reputation as a literary enfant terrible – is primarily due to the graphic depictions of sexual violence which feature throughout his work. Women are brutally tortured and murdered in the most extreme and nauseating fashion in American Psycho – and Less Than Zero infamously ends with a twelve-year-old being drugged and viciously gang-raped by a group of coked-up rich kids. While the content of these scenes alone is enough to shock and offend the average reader, it is the cool and dissociative tone of Ellis’s narration that imbues these scenes with a lasting and disturbing significance, elevating the violence beyond the realm of snuff into something much more darkly existential. Indeed, at the core of Ellis’s success as a writer is his unique ability to evoke a haunting and all-pervading sense of dread and ennui, which he then uses as means to provoke, unsettle and, perhaps most importantly, horrify his readership. The Shards, Ellis’ latest novel after a thirteen-year absence, is a timely remainder of this.
The Shards opens with a direct address to the reader from Bret Easton Ellis, who confides to us that it is only now, at the age of fifty-seven, that he is able to tell this traumatic story from his youth which, he implies, has gone on to shape the entirety of his fiction. Already, we, the reader, are acutely aware that this address is a kind of fiction, and that its author is pressing us into a game of sorts, where fact and fiction, sincerity and duplicity, are teasingly intermingled and blurred. Where does Bret Easton Ellis, the author, begin and where does Bret Easton Ellis, the character, end? This slipperiness between reality and fantasy is, at first, playful and impish in tone, but as the novel progresses and Ellis delves deeper his into the ‘trauma’ of his past, the narrator’s tenor begins to shift and distort, gradually becoming more suspicious and paranoid before finally spiralling out into a state of full-on delirium. What starts out as a waggish game of auto-fiction slowly turns into a sinister comment on the instability of the line separating truth and artifice, and how artistic invention can become dangerously indiscernible from authentic reality.
After this direct address, the real story begins. We are taken back to 1981, when Bret Easton Ellis is seventeen years old and in his senior year at Buckley College, an exclusive prep school in Los Angeles. Ellis is, of course, an aspiring writer and is part of a small circle of friends made up of Buckley’s most popular and elite students. There is Thom, a happy-go-lucky jock who is the star quarterback of the school’s football team; Susan, a coolly-reserved beauty who is the school’s head captain and model student; and Debbie, who is Susan’s closest friend as well as the daughter of a powerful Hollywood movie producer. In addition to their all being close friends, Thom and Susan are in a long-term relationship as are Debbie and Bret, despite the fact that Bret is secretly having affairs with other male cohorts.
Indeed, one of the delights of the book is the way Ellis so vividly captures the radiant heat of teenage lust and desire on the page, infusing the narrative with a thrilling erotic charge. When not studying or attending class, the group cruise around LA in luxury cars, wearing expensive clothing brands and high-class accessories, watching the latest films and listening to the hippest bands, going to parties at sprawling mansions and exclusive clubs, whilst drinking the best alcohol and ingesting the finest drugs. And yet in spite of the wealth and privilege afforded to him, Bret feels profoundly estranged from the excesses of his surroundings, which at times culminates in extreme states of zombified numbness and alienation. In an attempt to hide his severe disaffection with the world around him, as well as maintain his friendships and status at Buckley, Bret resorts to adopting an invented persona he calls ‘the tangible participant’, which is a pastiche of yuppie American stereotypes and ideals seen in television commercials and teen comedies. However, when Robert Mallory, a mysterious and incredibly beautiful new student arrives on campus, Bret’s persona, and all the various friendships forged from it, begin to warp and shatter.
Being supremely handsome, fit and charming, Mallory is immediately welcomed into the elite inner circles of Buckley College. Almost instantly, all the girls want to date him and all the guys want to befriend him. Bret, however, remains weary and suspicious of him, suspecting that Mallory, much like himself, is hiding behind a persona. In Bret’s eyes, everything about Mallory appears far too scripted, mannered and rehearsed to be seriously believed. Whenever Bret needles Mallory about his past or points out the contradictions in his various biographical accounts, he notes a certain ‘whirling’ menace in his eyes, leading Bret to think that Mallory is concealing some dark and malevolent secret.
On top of all this, Mallory’s appearance at Buckley coincides with the arrival of ‘The Trawler’, a deranged serial killer who starts committing a number of gruesome home-invasion murders throughout LA, in which the victims are not only brutally killed but also reconfigured into abhorrent human-animal amalgams. When Bret and his friends start receiving ominous signs that the Trawler may be targeting them – silent phone calls, mysterious packages arriving, pets going missing – he becomes convinced that Mallory is in fact the killer. However, this conviction increasingly turns into an all-consuming obsession with Mallory, which entirely distorts Bret’s perception of reality, compelling him to commit a number of perilous and morally ambiguous acts. Yet throughout all of this, Bret continuously reminds us that he is a writer and that his suspicions against Mallory may be nothing more than a flight of the imagination, a mere fantastical construction or artistic creation. Indeed, on more than one occasion Bret feels that he is hearing or seeing things which might not exist, and that perhaps his view of Mallory is product of his own desire to tell stories, to create fiction, to be an artist.
This shifting uncertainty between reality and falsehood generates a chilling gothic ambience, imbuing Ellis’s fabulously nostalgic evocation of 1980s Los Angeles with an eerie and nightmarish quality. Whether Bret is attending a party, stalking Mallory, breaking into abandoned houses, taking drugs at a night-club, investigating underground basements, conversing with friends or being chased by a mysterious beige van, an unnerving tension hangs over the entirety of the plot, in terms of how we, the reader, judge the veracity of these scenes. Did these events actually happen or they are projections of Bret’s psyche (or somewhere in-between). Much like the short horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, this tension in Bret’s narration suffuses the novel with an unsettlingly phantasmic aura, rendering even the most mundane encounters uncanny and enigmatic. Ellis’s cold and somewhat minimalist style of prose serves to further heighten this ghostly air, evoking in its hypnotic repetitions and cool starkness a foreboding sense of catastrophe and doom. This is particularly effective in scenes in which no explicit violence occurs and everything appears relatively normal and casual. And yet, via the uneasy tenor of our narrator alone, an atmosphere of dread and apprehension persists, reminding us that nothing is as it seems. Indeed, perhaps the only thing one can be certain of in The Shards is that, regardless of the situation, everyone is wearing a mask, cloaking their true intentions behind a glittering patchwork of luxury brands and upmarket labels, including our central narrator.
As implied in the previous paragraphs, pop cultural references are laced throughout The Shards, with Bret continuously name-dropping popular movies, song titles, television shows and pop lyrics from the 1980s. This not only paints a deeply nostalgic portrait of Los Angeles in 1981 but also gives us, the reader, an insight into the kinds of media which influenced and fed into Ellis’s later work. Vienna by Ultravox (a chilling paean to numbness) and the horror fiction of Stephen King (particularly the gory explicitness of Cujo) are some of the more interesting and telling artists cited, and their effect can definitely be felt in The Shards. However, it is writer Joan Didion who appears to have had the most impact on Bret. He rhapsodies about her various essay collections, especially The White Album, and frequently alludes to her work being a source of inspiration, in terms of both style and content. Indeed, it is quite easy to see Didion’s coolly detached prose reflected in the new-wave, minimalist aesthetic of Ellis’s fiction.
But Didion’s presence extends well beyond the realm of style and can be sensed in the novel’s thematics, particularly in terms of how The Shards deals with notions of decadence, egocentricity and evil. To be more precise, in her seminal essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1968), Didion describes how the excesses of 1960s bohemia incidentally gave birth to a psychotic form of narcissism, where any sense of responsibility towards others was elided in favour of individual experience and expression, which, in turn, led some to commit a number of morally reprehensible acts. For Didion, behind the utopian rhetoric of 1960s hippiedom lurked a malignant self-centredness, which the Manson Murders hideously brought to light. The Shards reiterates Didion’s observation but in the context of the 1980s: look beyond the drug-fuelled glitz and glam of 80s LA and one will see a pervasive nihilism shrouded under the guise of decadent individualism, which, as The Shards suggests, finds its apotheosis in the twin figures of the artist and the serial killer. In a tone that is at once flippant and serious, the novel intimates that the artist and serial killer are opposite sides of the same coin: they both use other people as a means to assert their own creative expression and desire, a tool to shape and fashion the world as they see fit. The novel cleverly demonstrates this point in the way the narrative Bret has constructed around Mallory drives him to do certain things that mirror the actions of a serial killer: watching Mallory from afar, relentlessly stalking him, breaking into his house, threatening him etc. Indeed, this notion of the artist as serial killer brilliantly climaxes in the book’s thrilling final act, wherein the roles of killer, victim, artist and muse become violently confused and hallucinatory.
As an auto-fictional text, it is hard to know how seriously we should take The Shards. Every character is hiding behind a mask or striking a pose to some extent, concealing their true self from the reader’s view, willing or otherwise. Even Bret, our central narrator, is unable to fully reveal himself to us or arrive at any firm, conclusive truths about his situation. In this regard, The Shards reads like a fever dream of the Lynchian variety, wherein fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, collapse into a shadowy phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, glamour and violence. But the main, horrifying point of The Shards is exactly that: truth and fantasy can never fully be separated from one another, meaning that the idea of ‘objective truths’ may itself be a mere fantasy. Indeed, as the novel sees it, we are forever condemned to a life of masks and fun-house style mirrors, wherein truth is surface and reality is nothing but a warped and nightmarish parody of our own splintered psyches. Like Bret, we are all cursed to forever hear and see things that may not exist, which is perhaps the ultimate existential condition of our modern age.
Patrick Zaia is an artist, writer and musician based in Queensland, Australia. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018) and B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space.
